Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles

By Diana Lindsay

Marshal South

The Ghost Mountain Chronicles: An Experiment in Primitive Living

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For 17 years, from 1930 to 1947, poet, artist, and author Marshal South and his family lived on Ghost Mountaina remote, waterless mountaintop that is today within California’s Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Over a period of nine of those years, South chronicled his family’s controversial primitive lifestyle through popular monthly articles written for Desert Magazine.

An acrimonious divorce ended the “experiment in primitive living,” Marshal’s South death in 1948 soon after the divorce, the refusal of his wife Tanya to grant an interview over the next 50 years of her life, and the many rumors that have abounded have combined to elicit wide speculation over the years. Secrecy, changed names and dates, and lost and burned records and letters have hidden the truth all these years, even from family members.

But there was just enough information and clues left, that slowly the story of the real Marshal South emerged. It took months of research and a team to find the answers. A research team in Adelaide, South Australia, searched documents and newspapers, once it was established that South was born there and not in London, England. Family members who had not been in contact with each other searched through old letters and documents they had. And, finally we had the story.

This new book contains the compete collection of his writings from Desert Magazine. Edited and with a foreword by Diana Lindsay; Introduction by Rider and Lucile South.